[WikiEN-l] Progress update on the music project

Fri Apr 8 05:50:08 UTC 2005

I just thought I'd give an update on the sound list 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sound/list). Since
I last posted here about it, there have been some very interesting 
developments.

When I posted about 6 weeks ago with a link to that list. I'll bet most 
of you who clicked on the link got a time-out error.
Why? Because, it turns out, Mediawiki was building media: links HORRIBLY 
ineffeciently. If you had a page with 10
linked ogg files, the squid would download all 10 files before serving 
up the page; if you had a page with 200,
the squid would time out before downloading all of them. Understandably, 
this error went unnoticed until we had 200
oggs to put on a single page ;) Tim Starling fixed this, and all pages 
with media: links now load faster because of it.

Dysprosia and I created a sleak looking set of templates for putting 
sound files on a page. You can see the result on
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_van_Beethoven and 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Amadeus_Mozart
as well as a variety of other pages. I could also use some help linking 
to the songs from articles. Right now, most of the
songs on the list linked to only from their composer's article, if at 
all. (And while I'm giving credit, Fennec gave me
a shell account on his computer, which, with it's very fast internet 
connection, has been indispensable. When Eloquence
changed the upload form (breaking the bash script I was using to 
upload), Avar rewrote it so that it works again.)

One thing I've noticed is that none of the sister projects or other 
language Wikipedias seem to have noticed
the songs. I'd appreciate it if you guys could put in a good word at the 
other wikis and projects about them.

Now to brag a little. The list passed 300 songs tonight, and probably 
well over a gigabyte of music by now :)

--Mark (Raul654)